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Year Two of the GDPR Commences with Regulatory Attention on the AdTech Industry and Additional Fines Imposed

Italy’s privacy regulator imposes a million Euro fine on Facebook. Facebook’s pre-GDPR data protection breaches in the context of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco has now attracted a million Euro fine imposed by the Italian privacy regulator. The Italian regulator found that Facebook had disclosed to the third-party “This Is Your Digital Life” app, personal data of 214,077 Italian users. ...

Australia: Employers Cannot Force Employees to Provide Fingerprint Samples For a Biometric Time Clock

In a landmark decision, Australia’s national workplace relations tribunal - the Fair Work Commission – has ruled that employers may not force workers to use biometric time clocks in the workplace, and that any dismissal based on a worker’s refusal to submit their fingerprints is unlawful.

The Fair Work Commission's holding overruled an earlier decision, according to which an employer’s ...

Israeli Court Rules Bitcoin is Not a Form of Currency Exempted From Tax FROM TAX

The Israeli District Court in Lod delivered a landmark decision classifying Bitcoin as an asset subject to capital gains tax. The decision was handed down in a dispute between the Israeli tax authority and the founder of a Blockchain-technology transportation startup.


The founder gained over 8 Million Israeli Shekels (nearly $2,500,000) in profits, by selling Bitcoin he had previously purchased. ...

GDPR Updates: Draft Guidelines on Contract as a Legal Basis, Clinical Trial Data Processing, Online Services Used by Children and Biometric Data at the Workplace

Performance of an Online Services Contract as a Legal Basis for Data Processing. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has published draft guidelines on processing personal data in the context of online services, under the legal basis of performance of an online service contract. Processing under the GDPR is permissible only if it is performed under a recognized legal basis. ...

Israel seeks introduction of a tax on digital sales

Israel’s Finance Ministry and tax authority announced in the last week of April that they intend to bring a digital sales tax (DST) that may reap some ILS 1 billion ($280 million) for its treasury. The tax authorities will be working on the development of a tax on the sales of foreign digital companies in the Israeli marketplace. 

The authorities ...

San Francisco Bans Use of Facial-Recognition Technology

The city of San Francisco has decided to prohibit the use of facial recognition technology by police and other local government authorities. The ban is part of an anti-surveillance ordinance that the city's Board of Supervisors approved, making it the largest American city to ban facial recognition technology.

The ordinance will come into force next month. It prohibits the use ...

A Medical Imaging Company Will Pay 3 Million Dollars in HIPAA Data Breach Settlement

A diagnostic medical imaging company from Tennessee has settled an investigated by the FBI and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, which enforces the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). The company was investigated for a breach in its servers that enabled unauthorized access to sensitive health information, ...

The EU Parliament Updates Consumer Protection Rules to Improve Transparency in Online Marketplaces

The European parliament has approved changes to the EU consumer protection rules, which govern online marketplaces and comparison services, such as eBay, Amazon, Skyscanner and Airbnb.

According to the new rules, enacted as a European Union Directive, marketplaces and comparison services will have to disclose the key parameters that determine how listings resulting from search queries are ranked. Marketplaces and ...

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